


i pretended that my demons were friends

by everAcclimating



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ableist Language, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Dissociation, Drag Queens, Foster Care, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Homophobia, Impotence, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Possession, Puppets, Religious Conflict, Sex, Slurs, Underage Drinking, Violence, conversion therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:21:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23102404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everAcclimating/pseuds/everAcclimating
Summary: a look at bro strider's life before dave came around, from childhood to adulthood.
Relationships: Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	i pretended that my demons were friends

**Author's Note:**

> please read all the tags before reading!!! i tried to hit everything i touched on, but if i missed something please let me know and i'll add it. the slurs are transgender-based and sexuality-based and there's ableist language, so be forewarned.

You grow up alone.

Perhaps that's an unfair statement. You don't _literally_ grow up alone. You grow up in the foster care system and you also have your best friend Lil Cal. Cal is a puppet, sure, but he's your best friend and your confidant and literally what kept you alive because when that good Samaritan found you as a baby, you were all wrapped up in his limbs to protect you from the cold. That trend continues both literally and figuratively. You suppose they sanitized him when they brought you in, since you're pretty sure you were found in a hole and there were probably bacteria, but that's not the point. Also, maybe they didn't. The system fucking sucks. Anyway: for the most part, it's you and Cal. You cycle through "homes" quickly because no one can handle you, but you don't mind it much because you at least always have Cal with you, even when the homes suck.

Your name is Dirk Strider. You know that, somehow, even though they call you Mark Lawrence because they had no way of knowing that you're _really_ Dirk Strider. You actually accept Mark for a while, because you don't know any better, but Cal calls you Dirk, and it feels right, so that must be it. But your fancy government-issued identity says you're Mark, so you're Mark. There would be no point in telling anyone you're Dirk, because none of them would care or listen.

Cal talks to you a lot, and you listen. You listen so much that you don't talk at all until you're seven and the foster parents get more and more exasperated with you the longer and longer you don't speak. Later, as an adult, you find out that people are supposed to put their kids in speech therapy if they don't talk by a certain age, get them tested to see if something is wrong, but no one ever did. A couple of the "fathers" tasked with raising a silent hellion call you a retard, but you let it roll off your back. You don't need anyone but Cal, and Cal can understand you without you saying anything aloud. He makes everything so clear and easy to understand and you like that. Humans are so confusing and they don't make any sense.

One of the things you don't understand is church. Most of your foster families are religious and by the time you're four you're wearing a sharp little suit every Sunday morning and being dragged right on in to the local First Baptist to listen to the fire and brimstone sermon. There's Sunday School for kids, but you never go to it. Could be because even though you don't talk, you wail and cry and punch when you're being dressed or when they try to take Cal away (you can't articulate it yet, but it feels like taking away a piece of you) so they don't trust you to sit still and listen to the old woman with the beehive hair. Either way, you're stuck in the adults' pews, sitting between Susan and Gary or Karen and Samuel or Enid and Tom with Cal wrapped around you because otherwise you'll scream the entire sermon. It doesn't matter which pair, they always take you no matter what. That's not all the pairs, but by the time you think on a retrospective of your childhood you don't remember them all. At least not by name.

Anyway, you start talking at seven in full sentences because your new foster mother refuses to understand your gestures, and you get punished for being so obstinant before since you could clearly speak before that and chose not to. Yeah, buy why should you get punished for doing what they wanted in the first place, just because you did it late?

You stop talking again. All you need is Cal. Cal's getting more insistent lately but you like it. It's easier to relax around him. Your foster father tries to take Cal away from you at the dinner table, telling you that misbehaving children don't get to keep their toys. You're almost eight, be a fucking _man_ , Mark. Only girls and faggots like dolls. Are you a girl or a faggot, Mark?

You don't know what a faggot is, but you've heard the pastor say it during sermons sometimes. You think they're supposed to go to hell, but Cal tells you hell isn't real and you believe him.

Anyway you stab your foster father with your fork right through the back of his hand that he has planted next to you on the table. He drops Cal to backhand you but you grab Cal and run to the bathroom, locking the door. He bangs on it for hours but you refuse to open it. Eventually he takes the door off the hinges and beats the shit out of you, but he doesn't try to take Cal away from you anymore. That's fine. That's all you ever wanted. You drag Cal to school with you and sit in the "slow" class even though you're a genius because you went back to not talking and everyone keeps calling you stupid. Someone else calls you a faggot for bringing a doll to school.

You realize what a faggot is when you're eleven and the pastor is hollering about how faggots and queers and ladyboys are all going to hell while you gaze across the center aisle at the neighbor's son that's the same age as you and nice to you and never calls you stupid. You talk to him sometimes when no one else is around and he smiles at you with big ol' teeth and your heart thumps and Cal doesn't like that. Cal doesn't like that but you do, so you keep seeing him and keep playing with him.

When you're thirteen, you kiss him. You kiss him and he kisses you back and it's your first kiss but it feels good and it feels _right_ and you let out a little hiccuping sound into it that's really embarrassing but he just kind of laughs in a breathy way that makes your heart thump all over again. You keep kissing periodically in fumbling teen ways when no one else is around until the day you get caught out back by your foster father with your arms around that boy's neck.

He beats the shit out of you. Rails on you so hard with his belt you can't walk for days and then once you _can_ walk you get sent off to a camp for queers like you. It's 1987. It's Texas. You write bible verses every day and refuse to talk and refuse to eat and refuse to admit there's anything wrong with you so they beat you every day. Cal's not with you. You're so scared about something happening to Cal and not about what happens to you or your blossoming identity that six weeks in you start sobbing and promise you'll never look at a boy like that ever again, you want to go to heaven and be with Jesus, you'll be good, you'll behave.

They send you home and Cal is in your bookshelf. You curl up in bed with him and cry and you can hear him again for the first time in weeks and he's telling you not to do anything that will get you separated ever again. You were so miserable without him that you agree.

You stop crying. You behave, and you talk more normally, and you never look at that neighbor boy ever again, not his dark hair or his smile or his bright eyes. Things are quiet, for a while.

You drop out of school at sixteen and run away. No one bothers to come looking for you. You completely decimate your previous identity by picking up odd jobs for some criminals that get you new papers, an ID, everything you need, all with your real name on them. Just like that. You don't ask how they do it. Your ID says you're two years older than you actually are, say you were born December 3rd 1972 and not December 3rd 1974. You support yourself with those odd jobs, doing whatever you can sans fucking for cash to make ends meet. You grow your hair a little, out of the crew cut they forced on you in those homes, and buy some sunglasses to take care of the fact that you can't see shit when it's bright out at all and people always talk shit about your orange eyes. You start wearing hats. You still don't talk much, but you say what's important.

It's just you and Cal. You're happy.

When you hit eighteen it all starts to really settle in, though. Cal keeps telling you all about how big things are coming, important things, and you need to be prepared. Ready. You don't understand it, but you internalize it. Be better. Be strong. You start training. You train hard. You learn how to move and how to fight and you watch old samurai movies and new anime you manage to snag vhs copies of and it's stupid but it makes you happy. You learn how to use a sword. Any blade, really, and you can use it.

You start losing time and you don't understand how it's happening but nothing bad ever happens as far as you know so it's... Fine. You don't have the money to go to the doctor so you don't. Instead you start going out to bars as soon as your fake identity says you can, drinking beers and hitting on older women at nineteen. You almost lose your virginity to a woman actually, 3 months before your twentieth birthday, drunk as fuck and begging your internals to just _get it up_ so you can prove how fucking straight you are. You're going to fuck this thirty-five year old housewife into the mattress with your virile nineteen year old body and you're both going to like it. She sucks you off for twenty minutes and you can't get hard so you lie and blame it on whiskey dick because somehow that's less embarrassing than admitting you wish she was a man and you bail and you never go back to the bar you met her at.

You don't take Cal to the bars and he doesn't like that. You do pack weapons to the bars and no one else likes that. You get into a lot of fights, gain a lot of scars, get stronger and meaner. When you're twenty you say fuck it and start going to gay bars instead, because you really don't want to repeat that goddamn disaster. You meet Ginger there and you think you're in love. This surprises you because you're drunk and you get one glance at long dark curls and you think fuck, great, I finally like a woman and she's in a gay bar. I want to hit on a lesbian. I'm such a cunt. But when Ginger turns around and winks at you and introduces herself you realize your folly.

Oh.

Nope, still a fucking queer.

After her set you talk at the bar and she clocks you as being only twenty because you have a young face but she doesn't narc on you, which you appreciate. We've got to stick together, she says, and you almost cry. She tells you she picked Ginger because she's spicy for white boys like you and you blush and kick yourself internally. You duck your head and smile a little, the first smile you can remember in a long time, and she kisses you on the cheek and leaves lipstick behind.

You keep coming back. Ginger keeps flirting and eventually you start flirting back and you're almost twenty-one when she takes you home. An old woman on the sidewalk tells you that you're both going to get the queer disease and die before you're forty and you laugh and tell her you don't intend to last past thirty-five so she's being generous, thanks.

Ginger gets you back to her apartment and disappears into the bathroom while you sober up with some water. She comes out au naturel and tells you to call him Antonio so you do as he falls atop you on the bed and kisses you senseless.

He's just as beautiful without the wig.

You bottom that night, your for-real first time, but you decide you hate it so every time you meet with Antonio after that you fuck him instead, face down dragging him back against your chest with fingers in his mouth as he moans your name. It's nice. It feels good.

You hate yourself every time by the time you get home, but you don't stop. You don't stop until you're almost twenty-two, actually, and the encroaching doom is getting ever closer in your brain and you're losing more and more hours of the day. You make porn now, having given up your earlier idea of making actual money off ventriloquist rapping, and it pays well. You're never in any of it, though. You make _niche_ porn, puppets with plush asses and long phallic noses because fuck it, right? Might as well. Puppets don't actually do it for you but Cal thinks it's funny. It's doubly funny that you publish it all in grainy magazines and on shitty lo-fi takes that people can download on their 56k modems for their nasty plush rump fix like a preteen eagerly awaiting the slow, chugging loading of some blond porn star's tit while staying home on a "sick day" and using the internet while praying that no one tries to call the home phone.

Anyway.

Things are going alright, you guess. Your head feels weird and foggy most of the time now but that's alright. You manage. Something important is coming and you have to meet it. You know what it is, you think. Maybe.

You know to bring a pair of tiny shades to your favorite music store one day and realize it's been destroyed overnight. You don't really feel much of anything about it either way until you see the baby and it all clicks into place properly with perfect clarity for the first time. It's not long after that the kid is clinging to you and squinting and you realize after looking at his eyes what the shades are for and you pop them on his little face and his expression gets less scrunched and Cal's voice says _that's Dave_ in your head and you think back _that's my bro_.

It's not difficult to carry a baby and also a pony home, at least not for you, and you think to yourself you have a lot of work to do because you're going to raise this kid right. You're going to raise him better than you were ever raised.

Cal's voice doesn't ring in your head but his laughter does, wordless and sharp.

You wish you could figure out what was so fucking funny.


End file.
